Nebius pledges almost £2bn for UK AI data centres

TL;DR:

  • Nebius, the US-listed AI firm co-founded by Arkady Volozh, will spend almost £1.7bn on three new UK data centres.
  • The investment will more than triple the company’s UK headcount and add around 65MW of capacity by 2027.
  • It lands ahead of London Tech Week as Labour courts compute investment for its AI “superpower” ambitions.

The billionaire behind Nebius has pledged almost £2bn for Britain’s data-centre build-out, in a vote of confidence for the government’s drive to expand domestic AI compute. Arkady Volozh, who co-founded the Russian search firm Yandex before carving Nebius out in 2024, said he would spend almost £1.7bn on three new UK sites and more than triple local headcount.

Compute capacity for British AI

The three sites, all signed, will offer around 65MW of power by 2027 and are already connected to the grid, with Nebius supplying the AI processors to fill the racks. Volozh framed the UK as uniquely attractive: “one of the few places where AI is being built, deployed, and adopted at the same time — by startups, by enterprises, and by the public sector.” The capacity is aimed at British customers such as fintech Revolut, which uses Nebius compute for fraud detection, and pharmaceutical start-ups developing drugs with machine learning. AI minister Kanishka Narayan said the investment would give companies “what they need to train, test and run advanced systems here at home”.

Nebius, now based in the Netherlands and listed in the US, has emerged as one of Europe’s fastest-growing tech firms, with stock up more than tenfold since 2024 and leasing deals with Microsoft and Meta. The commitment supports the government’s plan for a twentyfold increase in public computing capacity through new supercomputers and AI growth zones.

Looking forward

The timing is pointed: it arrives alongside the government’s own plan to buy British AI chips, reinforcing a UK compute narrative built on both public and private money. Volozh dismissed bubble fears, contrasting today’s paying subscribers with the “hype and hope” of 1999 — a notable stance given last week’s chip-stock sell-off. For UK firms, more domestic capacity could ease a real bottleneck; the open question is whether power-grid constraints and local planning keep pace with the pledges.

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